1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to apparatuses and methods for transferring or interrogating materials by carrier devices to receiving devices, where the carrier and receiving devices move independently and simultaneously on multiple axes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Laboratory automation has revolutionized the way experiments are conducted in research and clinical laboratories. Advances in lab automation have taken once laborious, manual processes for preparing, measuring, and moving around samples, and transformed these into rapid, high-throughput mechanisms for experimentation, having an enormous impact on various fields, including genomics and drug discovery. Laboratory automation has become essential for efficient, high-throughput analysis of materials in a short period of time.
Even with the advances made in laboratory automation, automation mechanisms have not kept up with the current drive to analyze and produce data more rapidly. Material transfer in automated laboratory processes is well recognized as the bottleneck unit operation that limits process throughput. Small delays in each of the steps of automated material transfer can lead to substantial overall delays in assays, greatly limiting the number of assays that can be performed per day. On an automation system, the delay in transferring material from a location in one microplate to a location on the opposite side of another microplate may seem small at first. However, when the goal is to screen thousands of samples a day, every second or fraction of a second delay in the process can be crucial. Since the containers or microplates are at fixed locations during a particular assay (except during plate loading and unloading onto the machine), prior art approaches provide little or no way to effectively minimize this travel distance between plates or locations in plates. Further, in many systems that transfer samples between microplates via pipettor tips on an automated pipette arm, those tips move as a single unit with the arm, further limiting the flexibility of the system. If there is only one sample to be aspirated or dispensed at a particular location, the other tips remain inactive, waiting for the one tip to complete its aspirating/dispensing step. Similarly, when one tip must be washed or removed and replaced with a new tip, the other tips attached to the arm must also be positioned at the washing/replacement location, potentially sitting idle during the this process. Every moment that a tip sits idle or waits for completion of a process involving another tip limits the overall speed at which an experiment can be conducted.
Some laboratory systems have developed mechanisms to attempt to gain back some lost time. The BECKMAN COULTER BIOMEK® FX, HAMILTON STAR™, and TECAN EVO™ systems have a carrier arm that can move independently of another carrier arm to individually access a deck of destination plates, but multiple tips are still linked together on each carrier arm. Also, the deck of destination plates remains stationary during the transfer process (except for plate loading and unloading). In the TTP LABTECH MOSQUITO®, a single arm/pipettor tip can move independently to pick and choose from individual wells in plates, but the system does not independently move multiple arms/tips. In the AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES VERTICAL PIPETTING STATION™, the arm with multiple pipettor tips moves independently of the plates, but the plates are only moved vertically on plate shelves. The plates cannot be translated or rotated along a plate deck, and the tips cannot access more than one plate at a time since the system relies on the vertically-aligned plate shelves.
Laboratory automation still has not overcome important bottlenecks, such as those associated with having multiple tips/channels tied together, with having plates at fixed locations on a deck, among others. Currently, there are no existing laboratory automation systems having decoupled linear and rotary axes of movement for the carrier and receiving devices.